Mini 'puter—handed out to 1 million British schoolkids this year—looks overseas.

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The Micro:bit mini-computer that has been given to around a million schoolchildren in Britain over the last eight months has plans to go global, after the BBC handed the project off to a specially created non-profit organisation.

On Wednesday, the Micro:bit Educational Foundation was launched in London, aiming "to lower barriers to technology invention for young people, makers, and developers globally."

It will take control of the original partnership during a phased transition designed to guarantee long-term support and continual expansion for a project intended to spur future generations to take up coding.

Further Reading

The Micro:bit itself is a small training computer conceived to help children learn IT skills and increase the pool of people who can go on to work in STEM careers. It was given out to schoolkids in Year 7—those aged 11 and 12—by a coalition headed by the BBC and supported by 29 tech firms, banks, charities, universities, and other outfits.

Efforts from the foundation will initially focus on the UK and Europe, helping teachers, governments, and educational institutions. Schools in the Netherlands and Iceland have already adopted the devices, with rollout to North America and Asia apparently planned for some time in 2017. The BBC will remain on the foundation's board.

"Our mission is to ensure that students, teachers and makers in the UK and around the world have long-term access to the Micro:bit and get the support and resources that will help them imagine, invent, and innovate," said the foundation's chief Zach Shelby foundation. "For us, this is about putting the Micro:bit into the hands of young people everywhere, unlocking the potential to bring great ideas to life quickly."

Shelby said he hoped to sell "tens of millions of devices over the next five to 10 years."

The Micro:bit has been dogged by problems, however. It was delayed for several months, missing the start of the 2015 school year, before being shipped in March 2016. The delay meant that some teachers didn't have enough time with the device themselves to plan lessons, though more teaching materials have apparently been made available since launch.

BBC Micro:bit features, pinouts, etc.

"If we could have allowed the teachers to have them a couple of weeks before the students, that would have had a bigger impact," Stem Learning consultant Richard Needham told the BBC.

"Some schools found it quite difficult to manage because they were asked to distribute these but it wasn't clear who had ownership of them. The BBC said they belonged to children and not teachers, but I do know in some schools the teachers hung on to them for a little bit longer to decide how they were going to distribute them."

Further Reading

The Micro:bit is a small circuit board with 25 programmable LEDs, a Bluetooth adapter, a micro-USB port, an accelerometer, and a compass, with rings to attach more sensors. It's programmable in four languages, using an interface with a PC or apps for smartphones and tablets. Research conducted by the BBC found that 39 percent of girls who used it would now choose ICT/computer science as a subject option in the future, compared with just 23 percent beforehand.

According to the survey, 90 percent of children said it had "taught them that anyone can code," while 88 percent said "it showed them coding is not as difficult as they thought it would be."

The foundation also has plans to "support diverse applications that serve a broad range of educational purposes and target age groups and extend its capabilities." Promised new features include peer-to-peer radio communications as well as "a strong library of resources for the Micro:bit community, including adding international language support and developing localised educational curriculums."